HOW TOLERANT ARE YOU TO LEGITIMATELY DIFFICULT BOSSES?

MOG, that boss video is a guy spamming the same skills over and over again.

This is why I like the Mario RPGs so much. Because the battle systems are so interactive and require you to pay attention and have good timing, you're kept on your toes even by the common enemies. In a normal RPG where you just choose your actions and watch your heroes kick ass, it's harder to accomplish.

I think it has most to do with the boss's move set and the way in which its weaknesses are exploited. Status problems, elemental resistances, pretty much anything that mixes things up helps. If the player can beat them by spamming Attack (or anything, for that matter), they're going to start losing interest.

There's a fine line between 'legitimately difficult' and 'has all 9999 stats.' This stuff is hard to balance out, especially to create the effect you're looking for.

Saga Frontier 2, like most of its kin, is a horribly balanced game and should never be used as an example for anything related to its combat, stat or skill systems. The game is in fact infamous for its final dungeon bosses, which can be impossible to defeat for the player if the characters simply are not strong enough. And since there is no way to power level at that point, you are fucked.

If you are looking for legitimately challenging bosses, look at the Shin Megami Tensei/Persona games. Outside of a few cheap tricks, the bosses in those games are done properly.

I'm generally not very tolerant. It also has to do with the fact that I tend to dislike bosses overall.

Grinding away at the same monster for too long feels tedious to me. When a fight takes a lot of time the frustration when dying is even higher because it means I would have to do another ten minutes of chipping of a small amount of health from a boss monster before retiring into a corner to hide from an attack and then repeat.

I must prefer bossfights that are essentially hordes. Where I kill a bunch of regular dudes in order to finish a level rather than have to fight a huge thing with a red glowing orb somewhere on it so I'll know where to hit it (and even then it'll take me fifteen hits to that red glowing thing before anything will happen)

Goddamn bosses.

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Saga Frontier 2, like most of its kin, is a horribly balanced game and should never be used as an example for anything related to its combat, stat or skill systems. The game is in fact infamous for its final dungeon bosses, which can be impossible to defeat for the player if the characters simply are not strong enough. And since there is no way to power level at that point, you are fucked.

I disagree entirely, for the only real example of 'whoops you're fucked no way to power level' example in the series is Lute's scenario in Saga Frontier 1. All of the other scenarios in almost all of the other games have bosses and final bosses that are designed to be defeatable if you managed to defeat the one before it. (and of course you can powerlevel and go back and train or restore your HP or whatever) Most of the time, if you absolutely cannot defeat a boss in Saga Frontier, you must have cheated or something because there's no way you could have even gotten to said boss in the first place.

If Saga Frontier did anything right at all, it's is gameplay and challenge.

Uh, I played Saga Frontier I and II. The first to absolute completion (even got to the final special area place when you beat all seven) and II until I got curbstomped by a boss in the final dungeon that I had NO WAY TO BEAT outside of reloading an old save before entering the final dungeon.

To say the games have good gameplay is laughable at best. The entire point is to spam your strongest skills until you or the enemy dies.

Xenogears had some of my favorite boss fights. It's not perfect but it's closest to my ideal out of everything I've played. I don't like the "endurance match" thing everyone does. I like the strategy part, and I think once you figure out the strategy there is no reason to make someone sit there for 15 minutes rehashing that strategy. Reward them for using their brain rather than time.

I encountered what I thought was a great boss fight last night while playing FFX.

It was the sinspawn you fight during the beach assault against Sin. Sinspawn Gui or something like that.

The reason I thought this boss was particularly great was because it REALLY pushes you to use every resource you have available to you. It's almost essential to use the abilities that should be available to all six party members around the time you encounter him. Auron and Kimahri bring down the arms, Wakka and Lulu work on the head. When the body's left alone, you bring in Yuna to summon and burn down through a considerable portion of the boss' health before the aeons die. Tidus hastes and cheers while providing damage to the undefended body.

Meanwhile, the boss is pounding you with strong physical attacks, Thunder, and Demi spells, so Yuna and potions are keeping everyone alive. It's dangerous to leave Lulu and Yuna in for more than a few rounds because the boss hits so hard, and often when all of the appendages are up. Auron's Power Break is pretty essential to mitigate the extremely hard melee hit the boss does.

I know that it's a Final Fantasy games, and that FF bosses are easy. I was able to beat the boss the first time I tried him (I've beaten the game before, but I don't remember a single encounter, so it's like playing for the first time again) by using all of the available resources. To me, that's a boss done properly. The boss really couldn't be much more challenging; if it required more healing, or was harder to kill, then that would just be manipulating numbers. If I hadn't beaten the boss with this strategy (which is discernible based on information provided by sensor or scan), then I'm not sure I could have beaten the boss without leveling up more, or getting lucky with crits and such.

Also, the battle lasted at least 10 minutes for me.

This just kinda exemplifies what my tolerance for boss difficulty is. I'm ok with dying to a boss once, if I'm feeling out a strategy and make mistakes, or don't implement it fast enough.

Super tolerant. More so than any sane person should be. I actually feel robbed when a boss is a total pushover most of the time. I don't however think that as a designer everyone thinks the same way of course. Having multiple difficulty levels certainly can solve the issues of working with varying player taste though.

My favorite thing to do is to look at the overall plot and see where events are climbing to story wise. For instance if you are searching for 5 crystals in order perhaps the first 4 bosses are easy, medium, hard, very hard in that order. After that the final and 5th boss in that story arc would be even harder and perhaps if the story continues after that you can drop things back down to easy and gradually crescendo again!

If the difficulty ramps up slowly enough usually players won't get frustrated or hit a brick wall in difficulty as they will be slowly trained to handle more difficult things. Just my two cents on the idea.